planet

Usage Note: Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto in 1930 added a ninth planet to our solar system, and thereafter students of astronomy were taught the familiar list of nine planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. But in 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to change the definition of planet, requiring that a celestial body must have enough mass to assume a round shape and "clear the neighborhood around its orbit" in order to qualify as a planet. This means that a planet cannot have other objects in or crossing its orbit except smaller objects that have been captured by its gravity, such as those that revolve around it as moons. Because Neptune's large mass has captured Pluto so that the two planets remain in orbits that cross, Pluto has not cleared its own orbit and was therefore demoted from planet status to that of a newly created category, dwarf planet. Like a planet, a dwarf planet orbits the sun, is large enough to assume a nearly round shape, and does not orbit a planet (as our Moon does). But a dwarf planet does not clear the neighborhood around its orbit and may cross the paths of other objects orbiting the sun. Other dwarf planets include Ceres, whose orbit is in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and Eris, an object in the Kuiper belt beyond Pluto. At the same meeting, the IAU created a third category of objects known as small solar system bodies, which includes asteroids (sometimes referred to as "minor planets," compounding the difficulty of the term planet), comets, objects beyond Neptune's orbit, and other nonspherical bodies. Although officially approved, this new scheme of the solar system remains controversial among astronomers and may well be revised.